We call the language we learn as children our mother tongue—usually because our mother is the one who passes her language on to us. Louis Wolfson's mother tongue was English. He was born in New York in 1931. Yet he published all his books in French and deliberately prevented their translation back into English.
As a young man, Wolfson was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The sound of his mother's voice, her words, became unbearable. He adapted by transforming his own language through an elaborate mechanism: he learned other languages so that he could replace the English words he read and heard with similar words drawn from his other languages. This strange linguistic bubble, maintained alongside a firm refusal to use his native English, became the subject of a book written in French and published to considerable success in France in 1970, Le Schizo et les langues. But success was never a concern for Wolfson. Where he is today is shown to us by Duccio Fabbri, who made his directorial debut with Squizo after a long career as an assistant director. The film does more than attempt to tell Wolfson's human story—it stages Fabbri's own friendship with him. That relationship, fraught as it was, ultimately made the film possible.
Wolfson now lives in Puerto Rico. He is extremely private, a tall, gaunt figure who seems untethered from time. He appears almost unaware of the camera pointed at him—yet he is perfectly conscious of it. This awareness made him a difficult subject: constant refusals, stylistic demands, sporadic cooperation. The director tried to reconstruct Wolfson's troubled youth with actors, but the real heart of the film lies in its portrait of the contemporary Wolfson—a man who speaks little and never in English, communicating imperfectly even with Fabbri, unkempt as a vagrant, revealing nothing of the remarkable mental machinery that became his art, his survival from his illness. Wolfson remains a mystery even to the filmmaker, who attempts his portrait knowing full well that mystery cannot be filmed. Yet if the enigma stays unsolved, the spell of this little-known figure leaves its mark.